A New York Times article notes the alarmingly high rate of retractions for articles in scientific journals.
… [The] scramble to publish in high-impact journals may be leading to more and more errors. Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent
Greg Mortenson, already in trouble for having apparently made up parts of his best-selling books about establishing schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, must now repay his charity a million dollars — money he is said to have used for personal expenses.
… since scientists pointed out the fraudulence of Yoshitaka Fujii’s work? A decade during which scads of his bogus articles about anesthesia appeared in all the major journals in the field?
180 of his articles are currently under investigation for faked data. 180! And all the time people were trying to get someone – anyone – to pay attention.
[One of the whistle blowers] wrote to the FDA, its Japanese counterpart and the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists to warn them about Dr. Fujii’s results — but received either no reply or a cursory acknowledgment of his concerns.
Scott Reuben, Joachim Boldt, Fujii – what is it about anesthesiologists? Are they in a permanent state of twilight sleep?
… to some extent at most American medical schools, UD says they should turn their attention to corporate ghostwriting of articles and books for university researchers.
AMSA’s simple expediency of publishing COI rankings for each school has shamed many institutions into taking more seriously not merely specific practices like free drug samples and the constant trolling of campus by pharma sales people, but also disclosure in general, as in how much pharma money this or that professor pockets.
The widespread scandal involving professors claiming publications in the scientific literature which have in fact been written, in whole or in part, by ghostwriting firms paid by pharmaceutical companies, is much talked about. But professional organizations and editorial boards – both almost completely dependent on revenue from drug firms – will never do anything about it. Universities don’t care. Only independent groups like AMSA can get anywhere on this one.
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We can expect resistance to all of these changes. UD anticipates a new organization emerging called PharmFee.
K-12 and university online for-profit education – always an incredibly trashy business model – is collapsing left and right as people and states begin to realize that their education taxes are going to the schools’ CEOs and advertising budgets, while the dupes the schools talk into enrolling are dropping out (“these [K-12] cyber schools might as well have a turnstile as their logo for the volume of withdrawals they experience”). Cyber university students get the added benefit of dropping out burdened with huge loan repayments.
Kaplan’s closing a Florida campus “that opened to great fanfare two years ago, but quickly lost students after a federal investigation raised questions about its admissions practices.”
Boohoo! But see that’s the business model there – you take in anyone with a pulse and syphon off all the tax dollars they come with and then … fuck them! You got their money. They can twist slowly in the wind.
You want to understand this business model? Read Glengarry Glen Ross.
Now investors are pissed because word’s out about the utterly shitty education on offer and how all the students are dropping out and all.
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But why are people so obtuse when it comes to understanding how markets work? You set up a tax-syphoning enterprise. You take most of the money that pours in for yourself and your investors, and you set aside some dollars for blitz advertising (you need a steady flow of money-bodies). Oh, and you devote a bit to greasing the hands of politicians.
With the seventy five cents or so left over you hire a teacher to handle hundreds of students per class… Maybe some faceless unqualified drudge in India… Much cheaper to outsource…
Oh, but here come headlines like EDUCATION ON THE CHEAP and articles predicting that “these companies probably won’t have much luck if they continue to offer shoddy educations while raking in profits.”
So now you’re kind of tinkering with the business model. Your basic philosophy – take the money and run – hasn’t altered, but there are many things you can do around the edges to look respectable enough to continue to attract investors and student dupes.
UD has confidence in you. This is only a temporary setback.
A special report on Duke University’s enthusiasm for Anil Potti.
For six years, Claremont McKenna’s dean of admissions added ten to twenty extra points to the school’s SAT scores. He has resigned.
… the research fraud beat goes on. Diederik Stapel and Dipak Das share a protocol: Just make the shit up.
So you’ve hired a guy who “had very poor writing skills” and doesn’t come to work much at all, spending most of his time in bars and at Disneyland. His time cards are fraudulent. He’s supposedly a fancy engineer working on your top secret satellite stuff under contract with the government, but you’re aware that he’s seldom there.
This paragon tells you he has a doctorate from Oxford University. He’s actually only a high school graduate; and, you know, he certainly doesn’t act like a person with a doctorate from Oxford. But you believe him because, as Ms Keeton up there says, you lacked the way sophisticated methods of verifying university degrees that we all, in a more enlightened time, now enjoy…
What? The guy worked for you from 2003 to 2008. The telephone (Pick it up. Call Oxford University. Or email Oxford University.) had already been invented. The method of verifying educational claims way back then was the same as it is now. Call the registrar. Or contact the British equivalent of these people. It’s not satellite science.
Ah, but Aerospace Corporation
was culpable [it just paid 2.5 million to settle Justice Department fraud allegations] because it knew that Hunter was not working the hours he submitted on his time card… The company profited from its employment of Hunter because it billed the government a higher hourly rate than it paid him…
Why look a gift horse in the mouth?
And you might ask – Is it such a big deal that Yale’s football coach wasn’t a candidate or a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship, as he has claimed?
Well, yes. Especially at academic institutions, fake degrees, falsely claimed degrees, faked credentials, falsely claimed honors — these are almost as destructive to a school’s reputation as its sports program.
The president and dean of instruction at Bishop State in Alabama both have diploma mill degrees, which makes the place a laughingstock. A university run by people unable to graduate from universities … People running around calling themselves doctors when they’ve pressed a BUY YOUR DEGREE NOW button on their computer… It maketh a mockery of all aspiration to institutional seriousness.
The Yale thing is of course much paltrier; but the principle’s the same: You need to be legit.
… will be the way it’s unlatching the experts. Already the experts are swarming out of their pens and telling anyone who’ll listen that the way to avoid child rape in your university’s showers is through ethics training.
[One expert] compared the current Penn State situation to the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
Neither university officials nor church officials are required to undergo ethics training that would prepare them to deal with conflicting allegiances and moral dilemmas involved in their work, he said.
The most enthusiastic champion of mandatory ethics training in our time was of course Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who is as we speak on his way to ten years in jail for corruption. Blagojevich required this training for every state employee, including professors at places like Northern Illinois University. A person at Western Illinois University testified to the effectiveness of the program here. She pointed out (as have zillions of others who’ve testified about similar programs) that the insultingly stupid nature of the tests and presentations drives people into frenzies of cheating in order to avoid the experience. (Read the comments after the post, too.)
I mean, look at the absurdity of this expert’s comment. Who needs mandatory ethics training? Priests. Priests!
Most people are not enmeshed in closed authoritarian worlds which may force them to mess with their conscience for the sake of a higher good. If you do happen to be in such a world, an online exam or a staged psychodrama won’t be much of a force against it.
Simon Stern and Trudo Lemmens, law professors at the University of Toronto, propose using the RICO Act to make university ghost and guest writers “think twice before allowing their names to be used.” They talk about the fraud on prescribers (of the drugs the articles promote), article readers, and patients.
What they don’t include is the fraud against their academic institutions. Every year, as they point out, professors submit annual reports to their deans, describing their research productivity. Pharma-fraudsters get monetary bonuses that should go to professors who write their own articles. This unfairness harms morale and collegiality; it also cheapens the institution by associating it with bogus, corporate-generated, research.
Universities, Lemmens and Stern write, “are reluctant to punish prestigious doctors who otherwise reflect credit on the institution and often help impress donors.”
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One thing that’s constantly amazed UD as she has written this blog is the way corporations pretty much do everything for faculty – not just write their articles. Chandru Rajam, recently a (not terribly well-received; too busy to teach… but who cares… just a visiting professor… only fucks up GW students for two semesters) colleague of UD‘s in the business school, has an outsourced grading business that will relieve UD of all grading responsibilities. She never needs to see a student paper! Add ghost-writing companies, corporate-provided PowerPoints (all you have to do is read them out loud! exam questions included!), etc. etc., and it’s clear that postmodern university professors who are willing to pay don’t have to do anything.
On top of this, UD lives in Washington – the richest metropolitan region in the country. While spending her money to make other people do everything for her, she has an immense variety of spas from which to choose.
Some of your med school colleagues routinely list three, four, five hundred publications on their cvs. And all you can do is gaze in wonderment at these superior creatures.
You owe it to yourself to learn about the massive ghost and guest (also known as honorary) writing industry in this country. Drudges – drawn from pharma-controlled ghostwriting companies or from underlings in the lab – do most or all of the writing for these creatures.
It’s quite the scam. And it ain’t going anywhere.
More than 600 biomedical journals have adopted guidelines for responsible and accountable authorship established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, but previous research has found that the prevalence of honorary authors in articles is as high as 39 percent and the use of ghost authors as high as 11 percent.